Canter Bridge

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Creed was still getting over the need to be profound when this 1999 release came out, but the results were promising. The band has its best moments when it relaxes. It manages to achieve depth better than than when darkness-cum-wisdom overshadows higher goals. Continue Reading »

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I am unable to review a Jars of Clay album without being positively influenced by the memory of hauling my two sons, their teenage youth group friends, and our dogs and cat around in my enormous Toyota Landcruiser in Costa Rica in the late 90s and early years of the new millennium with this music blaring. There, I got that off my chest. Continue Reading »

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Bill Paxton is the anchor column of this lean HBO film, but the best acting comes courtesy of Donal Logue as the reporter whom Paxon’s Lt. Colonel John Paul Vann befriends early on and Ed Lauter as General Weyand. There is some very stiff work from other members of the cast, but the film succeeds on the strength of the drama it portrays. Continue Reading »

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Although Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is normally cited as the premier literary inspiration for this landmark Francis Ford Coppola film, the voyage up the river is Homeric in its pacing, its cast of characters, and its staging. It is brilliant filming that takes one quickly past his expectation of seeing a ‘war movie’ and into the psychedelic mind of Coppola. Astonishingly, this film was released just four years after the last American troops left Vietnam, when the wounds were more than open. They were still bleeding. Continue Reading »

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Max Bruch did not exhaust the possibilities for romantic, passionate violin performance in concerto. He merely came close. Continue Reading »

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To call Keith Green a prophet may seem the product of an unguarded moment, particularly if ‘prophet’ is up there beside ‘flawless’ on your conceptual shelving. Yet a slow-and-steady listen-through of this two-disc compilation does more than take me back to my teenage years, when Green plausibly had as much influence as anyone on the shaping of my adolescent faith. It reacquaints me with his prophetic impact on a generation of mostly young Christians in this country and the United Kingdom. Continue Reading »

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American Legacy is subtitled ‘The magazine of African-American history and culture’, a perfect tag line for a high-quality magazine that does not so much celebrate a shade of skin color as it does the achievement of African Americans throughout the course of American history. Continue Reading »

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As I settle in to write this review, perfectly suitable used copies of this early Naxos CD are going for a dollar on amazon.com. Where do you find value like that? It’s like scratching around for an affordable one-room apartment and then stumbling on a tidy mansion whose owner will turn it over to you for $199/month. Continue Reading »

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Harrison Ford shines in this lingering over the close-quarter differences between Pennsylvania’s Amish people and the ‘English’ life that by contrast seems so rude in this 1985 screen gem. Yet twenty-two years later, it is the young Kelly McGillis who nearly melts the screen with this early performance as Rachel, the Amish widow who takes in Harrison’s ‘John Book’ and grows into love with a fugitive from ‘the city’ whose own heart grows entwined with the Amish way. Continue Reading »